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Thursday, March 30, 2017

“Our
customers are important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available
representative.”The irony of this
message sinks in after the first five minutes on hold. During the next five
minutes, it becomes clear the values of the organization are aligned around
cost savings—with the naive hope you’ll ignore their actions and believe their
words.Thankfully, there are
organizations that are a delight to do business with, where employees go out of
their way to help you—and help each other. This atmosphere makes you want to
jump for joy and figure out how to clone the whole experience.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

The
difference in these two scenarios is culture. And cultural innovation should be
a top priority for your company. No doubt you have probably experienced workplaces
where

managers
yelled at their teams. People keep their heads down to avoid doing something wrong and, as a result,
avoid doing something right. The culture of these places tamps down good ideas
instead of bringing out the best in people.

What about
your organization? Have you ever had someone tell you that your idea wasn’t
good, and then share it as their own? Or say he wants creativity and
innovation, only to criticize every new perspective?

Good ideas
are regularly squashed, never to see the light of day. You get the sense your
boss really does not want good ideas that don’t originate from him. So, as the
employee, you stop and you do as you are told. You know the written rules of
the company really are not true and that your place is to be quiet, follow
orders, and survive if you can.

Here is a
real example from a leader I have worked with that depicts the situation
mentioned above. While I was coaching this leader, he vented that his staff
lacked creativity. He said, “they never have any good ideas when I ask
for them. They just look at me blankly. It’s so frustrating.”

When we
interviewed his team the picture became clearer. He sent the message to his
employees that he really didn’t want ideas from them. He only wanted his own
ideas. They shared how they wasted lots of time and energy in coming up with
new ideas just to see them go nowhere.

When the team
feedback was shared with the leader he was shocked and did not believe it. He
actually thought he had a lazy and uninspired staff. The staff definitely was
not lazy or uninspired, just extremely frustrated. The boss was creating a

culture of
low accountability and complacency and did not even know it. This leader thought he valued others ideas but
his behavior telegraphed he did not!If
this scenario sounds familiar to you as a leader or as a team member you are creating
or working in a toxic culture.Maybe you
don’t have a boss yelling at you which is toxic enough but you have a boss who
is holding you down!

Cultures that
are toxic by their very nature are not innovative. People in these toxic
organizations lay low, stay out of trouble, and rarely step forward with an
innovative idea or recommendation. If you’re not purposely investing in a
healthy culture, your business is
already declining, whether you realize it or not.

VALUES AND CULTURE CONNECTION

Culture is
rooted in values. Not the ones on the posters in the hallways but in the values
that really shape the practices of the organization.

Notice the
beautiful value statements on the walls: We are a team. We work to bring great
solutions to our customers. Our people are our most important asset. Integrity
is our core. But when you ask for help you get bounced around.

Bersin and Associates reviewed 6,000 companies
on Glassdoor representing more than 2.2 million employees. They discovered, as
did we, that culture and company values were the biggest driver of a company’s
brand. Our own study of over 500 Fortune 1,000 companies showed that culture
and values statistically had the greatest impact on the company’s brand and
market performance, followed by coaching.

Culture is
also key to a satisfied workforce. In another 2014 study by Glassdoor they
uncovered what people really cared about. Culture
and values. Regardless of income, Glassdoor found these two factors to be the
top predictors of employee satisfaction.And as people earned more, culture and values became even more
important.Today employees move
around a lot more, and one key driver of why they come to your company is the
values you represent and live.For
millennials, culture and values is far more powerful. It is the hidden
underbelly that makes people want to work for you and stay.

TOXIC LEADERS, TOXIC CULTURE

We’ve all
experienced the toxic leader and we know how demoralizing that can be.But the worst part of having toxic leaders is
that they drive a toxic culture.Once a
culture embeds toxic behaviors and values – it takes forever to change.Interesting
enough, you can change leaders quickly but cultures are so powerful that they
suck the new leaders into quicksand of the old patterns and behaviors.The
new leaders either leave or they adapt.Changing a toxic culture is hard, takes lots of time, energy and money
that most organizations don’t have the luxury of today.

GETTING THE CULTURE RIGHTHere’s five
actions you must take to be sure your culture shines in the eyes of employees
and customers:

2.Ensure
your leaders behave consistently according to those values and allow no bad
apples.

3.Hire
and promote those that live the values – who you hire, promote and reward
speaks volumes about you as a leader and what you really value.

4.Get
the facts - monitor and measure your culture closely to make sure it reflects
the values.

5.Tap
into your customers and see your values through their eyes – does you brand
live up to your customer commitments.

Dr. Linda Sharkey is the co-author of The Future-Proof Workplace
(Wiley, 2017), and widely acknowledged as one of the world’s prominent thought
leaders on global leadership development. At the foundation of Dr. Sharkey’s
success are years of in-the-trenches experience with some of the world’s
largest and most admired companies, including GE where she was a Senior HR
Executive, building high-performance teams and developing talent that drives
productivity and company growth. As Chief Talent Officer and V.P. People
Development at Hewlett Packard, Dr. Sharkey was responsible for driving the
company’s talent management initiatives, performance management processes
career development, executive staffing, coaching, employee engagement, and
diversity and inclusion efforts.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Alexander
Hamilton and the Founding Fathers have made a splash in the news recently,
thanks to Broadway’s sensational production “Hamilton.” The modern hip-hop and
R&B musical highlights the leadership of Hamilton, Washington, and other
Founders during our country’s revolutionary beginnings.This brings to mind two questions: “Were the
Founding Fathers really the great leaders they are claimed to have been?”If so, “What can we learn from them?” Let’s
look at the facts:

üFacing
the opposition of King George III, leader of the most powerful nation on earth,
the Founders declared American independence and defeated the king’s formidable
armies with a military force that general George Washington described as “half-starved
and always in rags.”

üIn
a world where the rights of a monarch or a privileged few were all that
mattered, the Founders resolved to establish a new nation based on the
proposition that “all men are created equal.”They fearlessly accepted the risk of being hanged for treason and signed
their names to the Declaration of Independence.

üIn
spite of the fact that every previous democracy had failed, the Founders
created the world’s first surviving democratic republic which effectively
balanced power between thirteen independent states and all three branches of
their new federal government.

Most people
recognize the Founders as “revolutionary” leaders, but leadership theorists
have a more descriptive term for them.The Founding Fathers, such as Alexander Hamilton, George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams are seen
collectively as “transformational” leaders.

Transformational
leaders are the ones to call on when you need significant change.They are unique because they don’t just point
the way to a goal, keep a project in the black, or manage day-to-day activities.They envision significant change and define
it as “the right thing to do.” They exemplify moral integrity.They create appropriate goals, are honest and
vulnerable with their followers, and establish an environment of trust.They are followed with loyalty and respect.

Because transformational
leaders define the right thing to do and lead with integrity, their followers are
frequently motivated to do more than they originally expected to—and often go
“above and beyond.”Followers become
leaders in the cause.When the going
gets tough, they continue to persevere and make sacrifices toward the common
goal in spite of personal difficulties or hardship.According to leadership theorist James MacGregor
Burns, transformational leaders and followers “raise one another to higher
levels of morality and motivation.”

The Founding
Fathers utilized various leadership techniques, but for the purposes of this
article we will focus on three fundamental strategies for transformational
leaders.These strategies were intrinsic
to the success of the Founding Fathers well over 200 years ago, and they are
equally essential for aspiring transformational leaders today:

1. Exemplify moral integrity

Although George
Washington was an experienced military leader, it was his unquestioned moral
integrity that led Congress to appoint him Commander-in-Chief of the
Continental Army in 1775.Long before he
was chosen for this command, he had earned the trust and respect of all American
citizens.

It is
impossible to be an effective transformational leader without the trust,
loyalty, and respect of your followers.To
achieve this, a leader must start with honesty.Honesty can be demonstrated in many ways, including one that people are reluctant
to follow—admitting personal weaknesses.Fearing loss of respect, a leader may believe that it is advantageous to
hide his or her faults.But admitting weakness
not only encourages the respect of followers, but it also helps to establish an
environment of trust, which is a key action for turning followers into leaders.

2. Go beyond self-interest

After they decided
to form a new nation based on the proposition that “all men are created equal,”
the Founders boldly proclaimed their reasons for rejecting the king’s rule, and
wrote the Declaration of Independence to describe their vision of democracy.Then, despite a powerful British army only a
hundred miles away, they demonstrated their willingness to go beyond their own
self-interest for the good of others, and signed their names to the
proclamation.

Transformational
leaders today must first define their most important task.It must
be something of lasting importance their followers will recognize as beneficial
to other people as well as themselves. The transformational leader must be
willing to put his or her “skin in the game,” and demonstrate how others will
benefit at least as much as, and ideally more than, the leader will.

3. Respect your people

After the
United States Constitution was accepted by the Continental Congress and sent to
the states for ratification, the Founding Fathers were surprised by the adverse
reaction of the people.Where, the good
citizens asked, were their “rights as citizens” defined?James Madison respected this request from the
people and led the effort to generate a bill of rights—which were added in the
form of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

There are many ways today for transformational leaders to show respect
for their people.Ideally, they should
try to develop personal relationships with as many of them as possible.They should treat followers as individuals,
and attempt to understand their values, aspirations, and beliefs.Finally, transformational leaders should find
ways to challenge their followers intellectually, and develop methods of
integrating followers’ personal goals with the group’s goal.

So, a return to
our original questions yields two answers: yes and yes.The Founders were not only great leaders in 1776,
but are still worthy of emulation by aspiring leaders today.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

One-third of business leaders surveyed
in 2015 said that retaining colleagues is their number one concern. Everyone
knows that people are mobile. About one-quarter of employees say that they will
look for a new job in the next year. Some are chasing a higher salary, but
nearly equally important is the desire for a better opportunity inside or outside
their present company. Employers underestimate the importance of personal and
career development on employee retention, vastly overestimating the importance
of salary and benefits. As Christopher Bishop, head of Herman Miller’s
Innovation lab has said, "The war for talent is over, talent has
won."

Leaders who fail to invest in skill
development for team members implicitly enforce a rigid hierarchy that inhibits
innovation.A lack of leadership
development also undermines a key aspect of culture that drives
high-performance: trust.

Through my research, I have found that
high trust organizations outperform low-trust ones on multiple outcome measures
by a wide margin.My team spent a decade
running experiments that measured brain activity while people worked to find
out why some teams are productive and others engage in
"presenteeism."Trust, and an understanding
of how the organization improves lives, were key performance drivers.Our work also uncovered the eight building
blocks of trust.The science provides
specific and actionable ways that leaders can modify these building blocks to
increase trust and reap performance improvements.

One of the eight foundations of trust is
a set of policies I call "Invest."Companies that actively invest in the professional and personal growth
of colleagues are demonstrating trust in them. The brain's trust signal, a
neurochemical called oxytocin that my lab discovered in the early 2000s, motivates
us to reciprocate when someone provides us with a benefit.Our studies show that when companies invest
in colleague development, it increases engagement and productivity. It also reduces employee turnover: investing
in colleague developments demonstrates a desire to have a long-term
relationship.

In a surprising finding, my research revealed
that personal growth has a powerful effect on engagement and productivity.Philosophers such as Aristotle, and
psychologists including Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Martin Seligman have
argued that personal growth is necessary for human flourishing. Our analyses
confirmed this – there is positive feedback between thriving outside of the
office and productivity at work. I call investing in both professional and
personal growth "whole person" development.

Many successful companies have realized
the positive return from personal and professional development programs. SAS
Institute, a statistical analysis software company, invests in its colleagues with
an almost limitless set of classes to acquire new skills, gives employees
access to career mentors, subsidizes care for elderly parents, offers financial
assistance and paid leave for adoptions, has built on-site sports and
recreation facilities, has a beautiful campus with resident artists, and serves
healthy food in their cafes. SAS also minimizes the use of contractors and simply
hires the people they need. This commits colleagues to SAS and allows SAS to
commit to them. By all accounts, it is working.SAS is the world’s largest privately held software company with over $2
billion in revenue and 11,000 employees. They are also winning the war on talent: SAS
receives 200 applications for every opening and have the lowest employee
turnover in the software industry at two percent per year.

Investing in colleagues does not need to
be expensive.A trend at many companies including
Zappos, Google, Procter & Gamble, Hubspot, and Facebook is napping
rooms.Many colleagues are
sleep-deprived due to travel or having young children and this gives them a
chance to refresh their brains and gain the energy boost from a short nap.Other companies, such as mortgage lender
United Shore Financial Services, use a program called "Firm 40" to
focus colleagues on going all out for forty hours and then going home.These companies expect the parking lot to be
empty at 6:05 PM and that work is not brought home. Even Goldman Sachs has
gotten rid of the go-go days of 100-hour work weeks.To keep the best talent, they created Goldman
Sachs University to invest in professional growth and they also provide
guidance on taking time off. The co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs
said, “The goal is for our analysts to want to be here for a career... This is
a marathon, not a sprint.”

Just investing in colleagues increases
trust and productivity. The science I have done shows leaders how small changes
to the other seven building-blocks of trust will increase engagement.The war for talent is real, and building a
culture of trust is an important step in empowering, engaging, and retaining,
top talent.

So what investments are you making in a
culture of trust?Now is the time to
start, because your competitors already have.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

The first time Gary
Baker, president of Nationwide Brokerage Solutions heard about the research on
happiness and how it affects the workplace, he referred to it as “fluff.” And
why wouldn’t he? Our culture has long viewed happiness in the workplace as a sign
of lower productivity. Surely those infusing joy and laughter within the
confines of their office are slacking off and costing the company time and most
certainly money. By referring to happiness research as “fluff,” Gary was only
holding true to a generations old societal norm where happiness should be
withheld until after the job is done.

But what if happiness is
the key to getting the job done?

Science has shown that
when we are filled with positive emotions, our brains actually work much better
and our results improve. This can and does translate into workplace productivity
and overall company success. Our research has found that a positive brain is
connected with increasing sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and decreasing the
negative effects of stress by 23%. Instinctively we may know that the negative
social script of holding out on happiness until the work is done puts us at
odds with our most human instincts—and that creates stress and an epidemic of
disengagement. But because the desire to conform is incredibly strong, most of
us give in and slowly disengage from our work too.

Look at this through
your own lens. When you are passionate, happy and engaged in what you are
doing, how is your own productivity and success? How is it when you are
unhappy, disengaged and experiencing complacency or even dread? Those two
scenarios have two very different outcomes I’m guessing.

It’s important for
leaders to disassociate smiles and laughter with slacking off and, instead,
pair it with passion, heightened creativity and desire to reach goals. Your
team needs to feel like a team. Teams want the same thing. They work toward the
same thing -- everyone doing their part for the bigger picture. Experience
passion and happiness at work and with work is helpful to the bottom line.
People want to get their jobs done, freeing you up to focus on leading.

No iron fist ruling
necessary.

Against his initial instincts,
Gary Baker introduced our training program that would help the organization
confront and rewrite social scripts that were not serving success, and provide
a narrative pathway for people to reach a more positive mindset, attain higher
levels of optimism, and deepen social connections.

Our training is called “The Orange Frog,” and it highlighted stories of various frogs
in parable format. Through it, employees learned the best practices of resilient
leaders, how to become more adaptive, and how to develop a capacity to “see”
more opportunities, which all lead to better business outcomes. Thousands of
employees at Nationwide were trained on how to put the latest happiness
research into practice to achieve tangible business results, and it didn’t take
long before Baker and his team saw the effects.

What was the outcome of
this experiment in “fluff?” For one, Nationwide’s revenues increased by
50% in just 18 months--to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Additionally, the new insurance application rate increased by 237% during that
same time. When he saw results that he couldn’t ignore, Baker changed his tune.
He also changed the walls in his office, painting the entire call center bright
orange.

The once somber cubicles
are now scattered with orange plush frogs, and hanging around the offices are
large framed pictures of employees working at soup kitchens wearing bright
orange shirts. Employees are very enthusiastic about “being orange.” They know
broadcasting happiness--constantly communicating an empowered, resilient,
optimistic mindset especially in the face of challenges--can fuel their
success.

The changes did not stop
there. Now, at the Nationwide Sales Academy, as salespeople are initiated, they
are taught a story that is different from the usual corporate social script:

Michelle Gielan, national CBS News anchor turned positive
psychology researcher, is the bestselling author of Broadcasting Happiness. She is the Founder of the Institute for
Applied Positive Research and is partnered with
Arianna Huffington to study how transformative stories fuel success. Michelle is an Executive Producer of “The
Happiness Advantage” Special on PBS and a featured
professor in Oprah’s Happiness course.

Thursday, March 2, 2017

It’s crunch time. Your team is on overdrive. Each decision matters. Every moment counts. You can’t afford to be distracted and yet, there it is – the workplace annoyer. A team member with a trait, a quirk that gets under your skin. You rationalize, we have just been spending too much time on this project. Or as the leader, I have so much more on my plate that I can’t be involved in every detail and they keep dragging me in. Already you are spending valuable time thinking about it. And it’s costing you and the team time and energy. You know the project is starting to stall. You need a surge, a bump, a crescendo. You need an unexpected hero, not annoying subordinates.

Team engagement is always critical. It is natural to go for the obvious team drivers: the alpha, the verbalizer, the workhorse. What we value in them is also what starts to irritate us as the project stalls. I spend most of my time working with leaders on how to handle those annoying superstars. What is less obvious is how to empower the quiet leader: the person who leads from the back of the room, the person with the power to un-annoy.

This is the team member who intuitively understands your agenda. Unassumingly, they steer the team closer and closer to the goal. This is the manager who embodies the soul of the effort and emerges as the glue that binds. They may not be the most authoritative or the jump starter, but they will be the anchor. They will be your closer – the person who moves your effort across the finish line.

What is so special about this team member? Foremost, they have a sphere of influence that climbs steadily throughout the project. They consistently contribute and engage. What defines that sphere of influence? The term derived from international politics is a power, an authority, a right to have a say or influence over another. It’s a commanding term, it evokes strong images. And yet this subordinate uses their power wisely, discretely.

Learn to harness the traits that enable these employees to translate and evolve your agenda to your team. Count on these team members to drive engagement and purpose for long haul success. Recognize the traits of these un-annoying team members:

1- Inspiration. They believe in the work, the product, the community of the workplace. Settling is not in their nature. They want each interaction to count, to mean something. They find purpose in uncommon places and aren’t afraid to share their vision about the perfect customer, a new streamlined process, a better onboarding system. They make everyone around them look up and see what can be.

2- Sincerity. They mean what they say and they follow through. This employee looks you right in the eye (or right in the email) and says, “Yes, I will perform. I will show up. I will be the person you can count on.” And they do it, no ifs, ands, or buts.

3- Purposely Engage Others. They ask for help from the right people. They know it’s a team sport and cooperation and assistance from other managers, divisions, and departments is critical for victory. They know how to ask for help and get it. They engage others easily and maintain commitment.

4- Stimulus Thinking. Their ideas spur ideas. They enable others to connect to the brand emotionally. They set a platform to overcome challenges. They encourage interconnectedness.

5- The Celebrator. Institutionally, they believe in success and understand the millions of tiny steps it takes for your vision to become a plan, for the plan to be put into action and those actions to become a benchmark operation. They celebrate, every win, every loss, every lesson along the way. They take time to reflect and note the insights gleaned.

What’s Next?

Evaluate your team members based on their sphere of influence. Pay attention to the managers who promote engagement. Nurture this special skill set in all your team members. Let your quiet leaders augment team success. Celebrate their work from the front of the room.